Determining the workspace boundary of 6-DOF parallel manipulators

The workspace boundary of 6-DOF parallel manipulators is a two-dimensional surface consisting of many patches that can be obtained by solving different sets of four constraint equations. This paper proposes algorithms for finding the equations to generate each patch of the boundary. Methods involving a searching technique are first developed to generate some small subsets of the boundary. The obtained data are then used to predict the equations for generating the rest of the boundary.